A waiter is kept busy serving just some of the many tourists who flock to Ischia for its beaches, robust Southern Italian cuisine, and year-round thermal spas. The tourist boom, author Lorenzo Carcaterra writes, only started in the 1960s, after Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton conducted a scandalous, paparazzi-hounded affair while on the island filming Cleopatra.

Read "Island of Memories" in the September 2010 issue of National Geographic Traveler.